January 2007

"Wow"

Seth Godin's post gave me a good laugh this morning. If only Redmond's copy machines could copy a product introduction. Or maybe they copy the intro as well as they copy the product.

Manufactured Housing reform

The manufactured housing industry prides itself on the affordability of their homes. There certainly seem to be benefits to the factory built options, especially in rural areas where the ability to bring in contractors and do site-built homes is limited.

What the industry has not yet adequately addressed are the snake-oil methods of many dealers. Bait-and-switch and practices are all too common in the industry. Over the next few months I'll be publishing some of the documents from a recent experience we had with a deal that fell through when the dealer upped the price by 33% at the last minute. We'll also setup an area for those in the market for a new or used manufactured home to share information.

Drupal wish list

A couple of quickwish list items for Drupal.

  1. 5.x upgrade for the SPAM module. I've poked at it a little but so far haven't had time to really dig into it.
  2. Some awesome new themes. Garland is great but a few more will only help.
  3. An Atom module upgraded for 5.x
  4. A nice build script for automating the install. This is a bit trickier to do well and securely. I've got some code I'm playing with but I don't know that I'll release it becuase it presents the chance for abuse if people don't know what they're doing. If they do know what they're doing the shell scripts I've cobbled together may not be much help.

Recent Reads block for Drupal

Linkblog picture or linkblogs give bloggers a way to share links with readers without feeling like a full post is necessary. Earlier this week there was a post over at Scripting News about the to allow posts without titles. This flexibility is good as it allows for several different styles of blogging. I have shied away from one-sentence posts or shorter posts but still desire a way to let readers know about some interesting things that have crossed my path.

About a month ago I added the Recent Reads block on the left of this blog that is now called Points of Interest. The first version of the block was pretty straight forward. Using it is simple to point it towards the feature of With that system in place once I came across an interesting post in my daily RSS reading I simply hit "Shift-S" and the next time the site updates the newest items are added to the recent reads block. This works great for things that come across in RSS but sometimes I would find things from emails or other sources that I wanted to include in the feed.

A couple of easy changes later now feeds the Points of Interest block in addition to Google Reader. I simply setup a tag in Del.icio.us for each blog that I want a recent reads page on. This can be done in Google Reader as well. Instead of using the general "shared" feed it would be possible to hit the "t" key to tag a post and tag posts with the blog or blogs that I want the post to show up on. Maybe I'll do this later. To get the Drupal aggregrator to work as desired there are a couple of settings changes necessary. Now that the aggregrator is subscribed to both the Google Reader feed and Del.icio.us feed it is necessary to create a category, in this case called Recent Reads, which will be automatically assigned to every post in the feed.

Another great benefit is that because of Drupal's built in RSS capabilities the block is not only a point of interest on the blog page but readers can subscribe to it independently or in conjunction with the blog.

You might have a redneck baby if...

It is a pretty sure sign you are in danger of having a red-neck baby if you refer to her drinking from a bottle as shots. Extra points if you also suggest that she's taking swigs.

MySpace is awesome

From time to time in the past I've disparaged MySpace on this blog and others. I take it all back. MySpace is awesome. Sure their security is swiss cheese and the layouts are annoying but it is possible to live forever as a teenager. It is completely possible to easily jump right back into high school. The beauty of MySpace is that all those long-forgotten high school spats and grade-school spitting contests come alive again. Teenagedom at 25, 35, 45... reality TV has nothing on this.

Nevadans get clean air

District Judge Doug Herndon ruled Tuesday that the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act is indeed constitutional and can be enforced. Herndon reiterated his previous finding that the criminal provisions were unconstitutional but that the civil penalties under the law are constitutional. While the case was pending many southern Nevada businesses flaunted the voter's call for clean air. As of today the Southern Nevada Health District has a complaint form online to report businesses that are not complying with the law.Nationwide smoking bans have been a boon to tavern owners as customers who formerly chose to stay away return for drinks and food while existing customers who are smokers go outside and smoke.

The value of full text feeds

Steve Rubel weighs in on the value of full text feeds. He notes that a lot of Technorati Top 100 are full text feeds and that if a blog wants to grow readership full text feeds are the way to do it.

Slick criminal stories

According to the Boulder Daily Camera thieves made off with a 2-foot plexiglas display cube containing more than 40 iPod nanos. Somebody in loss prevention has to be pretty nervous about their position. Perhaps the clever crook will return it for a refill.

Home page maturity

TechSoup has a good (and short) post about judging the maturity of  your home page and some simple steps for making it better.

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